Hi vtmoz,

Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?

To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?

If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page

Cheers,

David

Hi Netzkern,

It actually sounds like you agree with me!

The way you are talking about 'tags' is how most people tend to use categories and sub-categories. I agree that categories and sub-categories are fine (if they have sufficient content, like you said).

Generally, with 'tags', you don't need to be overly strategic with how you use them - they are usually only there for users to find more closely related content on your site (more specific than what the categories or sub-categories offer).

My general advice is to "noindex" tags and never use them to try and grow your organic traffic.

Cheers,

David

Hi Marcus,

You could add canonical tags on the location pages that have no listings and point them to a top level region or another close-by location that does have listings.

The canonical tag will pass on any authority that each location page has and overcome the duplicate content issues that you are seeing.

I imagine that this would be a nightmare job if it had to be done manually, so hopefully you (or your developer) can set a rule that if there are no listings in a location it automatically points a canonical tag to another relevant page.

Another option would be to "noindex" location pages with no listings. This will solve the duplicate issues but won't pass on any authority the location pages might have.

Cheers

Hi Ben,

You won't get any benefit out of this and I wouldn't recommend doing it just to get "art" in the domain name.

I'd 100% stick with the established .com domain.

Cheers,

David

Correct. It would pass pagerank but Google would also remove the pages from index.

Can you populate the locations with no current listings with random listings from surrounding locations? Or leave older listings live on the page under a heading "Recently Sold" - or something similar?

If you want to overcome duplicate issues and keep the pages indexed, you will need to populate the pages with some sort of unique content you or are going to keep getting these issues.

Hi Dreamrealemedia,

I would have absolutely no concerns about losing rankings/traffic from making the changes you've mentioned.

Optimizing image files to improve page load and improving keyword targeting in title/alt text - you can't go wrong with that.

Cheers,

David

Hi Meler,

If GA is missing data on what you say are some of your top pages, it sounds like they might be missing GA tracking codes or it may be implemented incorrectly.

First thing I would do here is check that all your pages do in fact have working GA tracking.

You can use Screaming Frog to crawl your site to quickly identify pages that may be missing tracking codes.

Cheers,

David

Hi Mike,

Yes, after 2-3 weeks we saw the new site ranking well for the same keywords the old site used to and was getting 80-90% of the organic traffic that those pages were getting on the old site.

This was about 6 months ago and the new site now gets more organic traffic than those pages ever got on the old site.

I'd love to hear how things go for you!

Cheers,

David

Hi Brian,

This is a really tough one to respond to without knowing the domain and being able to have a look at it.

If you PM me the domain, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can find anything (I won't mention the domain publicly).

Cheers,

David

Hi Brandon,

Sounds like you might've updated the site template and removed some sitewide links to partner sites or social profiles.

Have you made any template changes (or header/footer changes) recently?

And just FYI, more external links doesn't mean you are doing better than your competition and the drop in external links doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.

Cheers,

David

PM replied

Hi Green_Web,

It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.

The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.

If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.

The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.

Cheers,

David

Hi Rodney,

Take a look at this article titled "Large Site SEO Basics: Faceted Navigation" by Serge Stefoglo: https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation

It covers what you want to know in great detail and discusses the various options for handling faceted navigation for SEO.

Cheers,

David

Hi Annabel,

OSE and other link tools may tell you if a site is linking to you, but they are not foolproof because it depends on whether those tools have indexed those links - which could take months.

The best way to check if a site is linking to you is with Screaming Frog.

Crawl the site you want to check and go to 'Bulk Export' > 'External Links'.

This will give you a spreadsheet with all the external links on that domain and from there you can find any links to your domain.

Cheers,

David

Hi Alex,

I worked on a site a while ago that did something like this to get the location of users in order to serve them location-dependent product pricing.

These redirects didn't seem to hurt their organic performance at all, but the devs eventually got around to using some simple JavaScript to obtain location information, and the redirects were scrapped.

Is the site you are talking about using redirects to get location information? If so, I'd suggest speaking with the devs to come up with an alternative.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ryan,

It would be best to use Screaming Frog if you want a true indication of your internal link structure.

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Cheers,

David

Hi Christian,

The current robots.txt shouldn't be blocking those URLs.

Did you or someone else recently change the robots.txt file? If so, give Google a few days to re-crawl your site.

Also, can you check what happens when you do a fetch and render on one of the blocked posts in Search Console? Do you have issues there?

Cheers,

David